Chameleon-Like Struggles: Negotiation Strategies of Critical Teachers in Taiwan’s Public Primary Schools

It is believed that primary education plays a part in creating socially just societies, and that students’ critical consciousness needs to be cultivated from the early childhood. Critical pedagogy, originally proposed by Paulo Freire, can serve as an empowerment tool to foster youths’ capacity to think critically and reflect on unfairness. However, Freire’s critical pedagogy has drawn criticism for failing to find its way into public classrooms, particularly in the Asian context, where traditional teaching methods are heavily employed. The purpose of this study was, in Taiwan’s settings, to examine the ways how, and to what degree, primary teachers exercised critical pedagogy in their restrictive classrooms. In the Literature Review section, I scrutinize the scholarly work regarding Freire’s proposal of critical pedagogy, the teacher-related factors that influence K-12 classroom practices of critical pedagogy, and the survival strategies of critical K-12 teachers. In the section of Theoretical Perspectives, two concepts, including the ideas of the culture cycle and impression management, are discussed to form the basis of how I address my research questions theoretically. In the Methods section, I depict how the phenomenological approach that involves individual interviews and document analysis is applied to investigate participants’ pedagogical experiences and the contextual constraints they have faced. Twelve in-service teachers who educate primary schoolers in Taipei, the capital city of Taiwan, and also are knowledgeable about critical pedagogy participate in this study. My findings are divided into three parts: 1) teacher alienation and teacher socialization, in Taiwan’s primary schools, operate as powerful barriers to critical pedagogical practices. The former takes the form of teacher mobility away from powerless students within a given school, while the latter is marked by the negative pedagogical shift and politically neutral stance of focal teachers who increasingly immerse themselves in the profession; 2) the undesirable working conditions of teacher alienation and teacher socialization dialectally facilitate the growth of critical reflection among five critical focal teachers. The development of such reflective thinking essentially differs by teachers’ social-class profiles. The focal teachers who come from middle-class families reflect on their negative, mainstream colleagues, while their counterparts who have a working-class origin introspect deeply about their negative schooling experiences; and 3) teacher negotiation characterizes the strategic struggles of five focal teachers in an attempt to teach against the grain and teach the taboo. The ways how these critical teachers negotiate the school’s limit-situations vary by the subjects they teach. In the Conclusion section, I wrap up this study by arguing that extending critical pedagogy into Taiwan’s primary schools is a complicated procedure marked by focal teachers’ constant struggles which involve confronting the barriers, developing critical consciousness, and taking strategic actions. Lastly, I consider the implications of this study for Freirean scholarship, qualitative methodology, and primary school practices of critical pedagogy